Flock Safety CEO speaks out after LAPD suspends use of company's surveillance cameras

“Once they understand what the technology actually does – not what it might do in 50 years, not what someone thinks it could do, but what it actually does, day in and day out, it takes a picture of a car – most people go, ‘This makes a lot of sense. I want my kids to be safe.’”

He argues that all it does it takes pictures of license plates. And then says how it keeps children safe. 🤨

Mass surveillance always expands beyond its promise.

“We’ve got to tighten up the policy and make sure everyone is aligned and then turn [the Los Angeles camera system] back on,” [Flock co-founder and CEO Garrett] Langley said.

Sucks to be you, then, doesn’t it.

“The technology is really simple,” he told ABC7. “A car drives by, we take a picture. It’s a static picture of a car, and then we read the license plate. That’s what the technology is – it’s actually not that complicated, it’s pretty simple.”

Sure. Just the license plate. Which is why the ACLU says that you collect “make, model and color of a car, other identifiers like scratches and dents, and anything else they can see.” It can include items “such as trailers, toolboxes, bumper stickers, or bike racks.” That’s why your cameras have audio detection hardware. That’s why your cameras are on biking trails, where no cars will be found.

Then using data analysis like that in Finding Paul Revere reveals a bunch of information about your habits, your friendships, and your associations. But, sure, you have nothing to lose :/

He’s so full of shit: “The technology is really simple,” he told ABC7. “A car drives by, we take a picture. It’s a static picture of a car, and then we read the license plate. That’s what the technology is – it’s actually not that complicated, it’s pretty simple.”

When in fact these use AI to build what the company calls a “Vehicle Fingerprint” to identify each car by make, model, color, body type, and distinguishing features like bumper stickers, roof racks, dents, decals, and even objects in truck beds. They can track and identify vehicles even when license plates are missing, obscured, or swapped for an 6-12 frame interaction. Moreover it is a database of metadata allowing them to characterize personality, trends, habits, and patterns across 80,000 cameras in 49 states. That’s just the plate readers.

They’ve grown to include ‘first responder’ drones, audio sensors, gunshot detection sensors, and full video surveillance in both the public and private sphere.

And worse is it’s real-time cross-jurisdictional alerting, which has seen multiple false reports.

So it’s damn well not just a static picture of a car, but surveillance capitalism.

When even the LAPD are too embarrassed to be using your shit.

Flock cameras are not LPR cameras. They are regular security cameras, with server-based AI. They even show demos to potential customers showing how the their product can search for specific people based on clothes, animal types, children/babies, strollers, carts, etc. across the entire country from one web-based interface. It’s all very Orwellian and I don’t think this issue either starts nor stops with Flock as a company. This type of surveillance is going to be ubiquitous regardless of what company(s) show up for making money from it.

Fret not, friends. The cities going anti-Flock will simply will sign up with that other company that has an ALPR and Trump owns stock in and is partially owned by Blackrock: Axon

Title sounds like Flock has somehow been wronged and is now “speaking out”. I bet that’s exactly how they want it. I also saw a Flock ad video that casually claimed to help against “terrorists, like AntiFa”. Thanks, MAGA, this is now common.

lol, “Flock Safety CEO” sounds the same as “Meta’s Chief Privacy Officer”.

until we can get those data, privacy, security and sharing concerns ironed out through a contractual relationship

Trust me bro. These systems will never be abused by those managing the system: surely they couldn’t give themselves access privileges, surely they couldn’t remove data access records, surely individuals in positions of power would never modify, remove or share data out of self-protection, including their buddies’ (assets)…

You’re all just a little confused, you see: these video-capable cameras currently only record snapshots of vehicle identifiers, that happen to be registered to individuals, and might depict its driver and persons surrounding the vehicle. And don’t give me any of that future hocus pocus of “video footage”; that doesn’t exist actually, it cannot simply be enabled with a single over-the-air update…

These cameras, among the many others might, or might not keep a record of everything you do outside your home, and stack it on top of data harvested by other data aggregators; but we promise we won’t look at it. Why aren’t you smiling? It’s by contract: we’ll monitor compliance of both our self and our partner with a mutual interest. And uuuhp, no deliberate loopholes that we actively exploit.

flock and safety, doesnt go together, its a mass surveillance using AI that haullcinates, profiles dissidents, ex-partners,,,etc.

Everyone with a brain cell predicted this when Flock began to become infamous earlier this year.

If your cameras are “AI-Powered” and collecting billions of data points on people, it’s just going to equate to (at least) tens of thousands erroneous identifications due to the limitations of the software.

And that’s unacceptable.

lol they LAPD stopped using then (bs) but they are all still collecting data…

He’s so full of shit: “The technology is really simple,” he told ABC7. “A car drives by, we take a picture. It’s a static picture of a car, and then we read the license plate. That’s what the technology is – it’s actually not that complicated, it’s pretty simple.”

When in fact these use AI to build what the company calls a “Vehicle Fingerprint” to identify each car by make, model, color, body type, and distinguishing features like bumper stickers, roof racks, dents, decals, and even objects in truck beds. They can track and identify vehicles even when license plates are missing, obscured, or swapped for an 6-12 frame interaction. Moreover it is a database of metadata allowing them to characterize personality, trends, habits, and patterns across 80,000 cameras in 49 states. That’s just the plate readers.

They’ve grown to include ‘first responder’ drones, audio sensors, gunshot detection sensors, and full video surveillance in both the public and private sphere.

And worse is it’s real-time cross-jurisdictional alerting, which has seen multiple false reports.

So it’s damn well not just a static picture of a car, but surveillance capitalism.

“The technology is really simple,” he told ABC7. “A car drives by, we take a picture. It’s a static picture of a car, and then we read the license plate. That’s what the technology is – it’s actually not that complicated, it’s pretty simple.”

100% lying: https://www.404media.co/flocks-ceo-says-its-alprs-dont-do-video-after-repeatedly-announcing-they-can/

LAPD suspending their contract gives me hope that this movement is strong enough.

Protesting, showing up to city council, and generally making officials’ lives uncomfortable is the bare minimum, because it works.

I don’t care if the technology is simple and I don’t care if it only records license plates, it is inherently wrong.

If it’s a tech product, they’re lying about it’s use. Everything is a façade on top of a darker and more sinister reason. Go Luddites!

My asshole spoke out against the flock safety ceo speaking out and it said that he can eat shit

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the concept of ANPRs (automatic number plate recognition) as these are called in the rest of the world. It’s more of an issue that there is a complete lack of laws surrounding how that data is to be used, and especially when it’s controlled by a private company. If there were strict laws limiting the situations where ANPRs could be used, such as requiring a warrant to begin searching for plate numbers and automatically discarding data from non-matching plates, I doubt people would complain as much about these.